`Temptations' Mixes Triumph With Tragedy

TRAFFORD, Pa. - On a set built to re-create Motown Records, with rhythm and blues thumping in the air and people dressed in 1960s chic, the original Temptations - or a reasonable facsimile thereof - are reliving history in all its smoky, soulful glory.

"The Temptations," a four-hour miniseries that will set up November sweeps for NBC, chronicles the group that recorded 43 top-10 singles over 25 years and sold more than 22 million records.

They were once billed as "the tall, tan and tempting Temptations" and were famous for their music, emotion and the image - always the image - of a silky-smooth, harmonizing group of five black men who achieved crossover appeal to white audiences. Musicians influenced by their sound include the Rolling Stones and John Oates (of the group Hall & Oates), who once said the group changed his life.

"I lived and died for the Temptations," said Alan Rosenberg, the actor who plays the group's longtime manager, Shelly Berger.

As a teenager, Rosenberg saw the Temptations at the Copacabana and memorized their dance steps.

"Nobody ever saw color, nobody ever saw race," he said. "It was sort of an oasis during the turbulent '60s."

The film, which is based on founding member Otis Williams' 1988 book, "The Temptations" - traces the group's history from sidewalk harmonizers to superstars, with some amusing anecdotes showing their road to fame wasn't always smooth.

On the set of the show, which has just completed production, it's easy to forget that four of the group's five best-known members have died, that the songs are 30 years old, and that one member took cortisone shots in his knees so he could keep performing the group's trademark moves.

Front man David Ruffin died from a drug overdose at age 50; Paul Williams, bounced from the group in 1971 for alcoholism, killed himself two years later at age 34. Two other original members died at 52: Eddie Kendricks from lung cancer in 1992 and Melvin Franklin, the bass singer, in 1995 after a series of seizures. Only Otis Williams survives.

"I want Marvin Gaye here, I want Smokey (Robinson) here," barks director Allan Arkush, who calls most of his actors by their characters' names and hardly notices the irony.

"It's like getting to live your life twice. Maybe you can get to improve it the second time around," said executive producer Suzanne dePasse, who was the business partner of Motown founder Berry Gordy.

The show already has generated some controversy among relatives of Ruffin, who died in 1991 after overdosing at a crack house in Philadelphia. Williams' book depicted Ruffin - the lead vocalist on such Temptations hits as "My Girl" and "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" - as a talented egomaniac who was expelled from the group in 1968.

The actor portraying Ruffin, who goes simply by the name Leon, said Ruffin's fatal flaw was his excessiveness - "wanting the group to be his, the women, the parties."

"Ego can make you lonely, but it doesn't kill you," he said.

Charles Malik Whitfield said he is playing Otis Williams "as truthfully as possible. Even though he's alive, it's not an impersonation."

Learning the Temptations' signature choreography was difficult enough, but Whitfield - who is bald in real life - said the real killer has been changing hairstyles so frequently.

At one point, he awoke the day after a shoot to discover that his pillow was attached to his head from residual wig glue.

"I could not believe it - this glue, this hair," he said, laughing.

The worst style was the "Tony Curtis," which he described as a "flattop process hairdo with a dipsy-doodle in front."

In one scene, actor Obba Babatunde, as Motown's Gordy, is testing out the early Temptations tune "Paradise" on a group of extras playing record-company workers. As dePasse chats on a cell phone off the set and bends over a script with a pencil, she is absently bouncing to the music she has probably heard thousands of times.

Gordy then asks the room whether they would spend their last dollar on the record or a sandwich. The unanimous answer: A sandwich.

The film also deals with the unsavory side of the group's history. In one poignant scene, a drunken Paul Williams stumbles around a party singing "For Once in My Life."

"It's like you're in the room and you want to leave the party, because it's painful to watch," said Arkush, the director. "This movie will only work if the storytelling does not stop between songs . . . If we were doing an action picture, these would be the fight scenes."